How many engineers does it take to build a social network?

Deepak Chennakkadan, a former Microsoft and Turn 10 Studios engineer, built and launched Pollzy, a poll-centered social platform for iOS and Android, as a solo developer despite having no previous mobile-app experience. Developed from July 2025 and released on August 26, 2026, Pollzy combines swipeable polls, quizzes, Duels, opinion-matching features, personalized feeds, messaging, moderation, notifications, subscriptions, identity verification, and advertising. Chennakkadan chose Expo and React Native to maintain one cross-platform codebase and build iOS apps in the cloud without initially owning a Mac, while Firebase supplied real-time backend services through Firestore, Cloud Functions, and Storage. Major technical challenges included feed ranking and cost control, cross-platform testing, multi-account isolation, account-aware notifications, messaging permissions, and native advertising mediation, which required Expo config plugins and platform-specific configuration. AI coding assistance from Codex accelerated implementation and debugging, though product decisions, architecture, code review, and testing remained his responsibility. He identifies late security-rule implementation and delayed Firestore cost analysis as key mistakes, later addressing them with emulator datasets and profiling tools. After launch, he found marketing, user growth, revenue, legal obligations, and business operations more daunting than engineering, while arguing that tools such as Expo, Firebase, and AI have expanded what an individual developer can build.

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